1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates generally to establishing a trusted computing environment across distinct security domains in the context of a “cloud” compute environment.
2. Background of the Related Art
An emerging information technology (IT) delivery model is cloud computing, by which shared resources, software and information are provided over the Internet to computers and other devices on-demand. Cloud computing can significantly reduce IT costs and complexities while improving workload optimization and service delivery. With this approach, an application instance can be hosted and made available from Internet-based resources that are accessible through a conventional Web browser over HTTP. An example application might be one that provides a common set of messaging functions, such as email, calendaring, contact management, and instant messaging. A user would then access the service directly over the Internet. Using this service, an enterprise would place its email, calendar and/or collaboration infrastructure in the cloud, and an end user would use an appropriate client to access his or her email, or perform a calendar operation.
Cloud compute resources are typically housed in large server farms that run network applications, typically using a virtualized architecture wherein applications run inside virtual servers, or so-called “virtual machines” (VMs), that are mapped onto physical servers in a data center facility. The virtual machines typically run on top of a hypervisor, which is a control program that allocates physical resources to the virtual machines.
It is known in the art to provide an appliance-based solution to facilitate rapid adoption and deployment of cloud-based offerings. One such appliance is IBM® Workload Deployer, which is based on the IBM DATAPOWER® 7199/9005 product family. Typically, the appliance is positioned directly between the business workloads that many organizations use and the underlying cloud infrastructure and platform components. Because of this unique position, the appliance can receive and act upon operational data, and it can monitor application workload demand conditions and adjust resource allocation or prioritization as required to achieve established service level agreements. IBM Workload Deployer (IWD) also may be used to manage a shared, multi-tenant environment, where isolation and security are important.
IBM Workload Deployer and, more generally, platform-as-a-service (PAS) infrastructure software (IPAS), can be extended by installing additional services for the cloud computing environment. Some examples include, for example, caching services to add a data caching capability to virtual applications, monitoring services to monitor health and performance status of virtual applications, and the like. Often, the new service is provided by a commercial product that has its own built-in security mechanisms including, for example, user management, authentication and access control. While it can be quite advantageous to add such services, there is no simple way to integrate such products with the cloud computing infrastructure to provide users seamless security integration with single sign-on (SSO) behavior, and consistent and unified access control policy. This is because, typically, these additional services are installed in a manner similar to any new deployment, meaning that they are installed into their own separate security domain (for isolation).
To illustrate the problem, it is well-known that different monitoring products frequently are used to monitor different parts and aspects of a system's resources. Thus, for example, there are monitor products that monitor health status and performance of physical resources, such as the virtual machine, CPU, memory and disk storage usage; other monitoring tools monitor database health, utilization and throughput performance. When installing such disparate products in an IBM Workload Deployer (or IPAS) environment, an administrator may receive a general warning that, say, a virtual machine is not functioning properly. To view the general status in more detail, the administrator then clicks on a resource link to one monitoring product but, by doing so, but then he or she discovers that the problem is caused by a database subsystem being monitored by another product. In this process, the administrator moves from one monitoring product to a different one, which involves traversing through different trust domains and different resource representations. This requirement greatly complicates the deployment and management operations.
Currently, there is no easy way to link multiple products together, to integrate them with the cloud computing infrastructure, and to present an integral management system.
This disclosure addresses this problem.